The Trans - Australian Wonderland

A.G. Bolam

Publisher Norris G. Bell , softcover illustrated

PREFACE.
This little book was written amid the sandhills of Ooldea, and the matter in it is principally the record of my own observations and investigations; and what is not so has been extracted by me from the historical memoirs of this State, or has been supplied to me by the actual participants in the scenes and incidents which I now describe. Often, during my residence in this Trans-Australian Wonderland, I have thought that the experiences of myself and others who have been and seen would be of some little interest to those thousands of travellers who journey across Australia by the TransAustralian Railway, and to whom that great railway is nothing else than a line on the map.

No college-trained naturalist am I, but a railwayman who in the odd moments when he bas not been giving the right-away to trains, or taking down the tick-tack of the telegraph, has been taught his lessoes in natural history by the greatest masters of the subject—the blacks at Ooldea.

If this little volume should be regarded by naturalists as even an unimportant addition to the literature of the country, or if it be just of passing interest to the traveller by train, then shall I feel deeply honored. The writing of its pages has afforded me the greatest pleasure; but with that pleasure there come pangs of pain when I reflect that the chief actors in the scene—the simple children of the scrub and the plain—are rapidly passing away to "the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns." With these black friends of mine crossing to the Great Beyond, is it a wonder then that Kendall's beautiful lines should be ever haunting my thoughts ?

"Will he go in his sleep from these desolate lands,
Like a chief, to the rest of his race,
With the honey-voiced woman who beckons and stands, And gleams like a dream in his face- Like a marvellous dream in his face."